In the same way that A is the best hepatitis?
I guess it’s a step up on the shite that Sony and Samsung have been making in that there actually has been some design work going on. That dead area at the bottom looks stupid though.
I wonder if any of these will actually be used?
I refuse to accept that gap at the bottom was unavoidable.
What they mean is they didn’t try hard enough and wanted it out NOW rather than later.
Yeah. “that’s were the drivers go.” Clearly unavoidable
I hope it comes with a watch face setting that looks like this just to remind you that it has you under constant surveillance. And it should be animated too- the eye could dart around suspiciously and blink occasionally.
Edit: didn’t intend that as a reply to TimmoWarner
As someone who hasnt worn a watch since 2001, I gotta say this looks nice. Especially for notifications where unlocking my phone is impractical.
If this one was a reality I would surreptitiously point it at dinner guest I wasn’t talking to, untell the end of whatever CSB I was in the middle of, make eye contact and say, “I hope we see eye to eye on this matter”
pets evil kitten on lap
Have you ever taken apart an LCD display? They have a narrow driver chip glued to the glass and a connection area beyond the chip, where a flex circuit cable is bonded to the glass.
It really is unavoidable, without reinventing the way that LCD screens are built.
It would be an incremental, not revolutionary, improvement to run the circuit traces around the edge to drivers on the backside of the display.
Sooo… not unavoidable then.
Something about releasing a round screen, but not really makes it unacceptable to me. I would look at it everyday and see that it’s a fraud.
I’ll wait for the guys who figure it out or just never have one.
It’s called Chip-on-glass … it’s the driver chip seen as the skinny rectangle just below the display and above the cable:
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. For example, this display has 128x64 pixels. The driver chip has 192 wires, some memory, drivers (duh), and a simple interface to a computer. Without the driver, you’d have to put all this logic onto the PC board instead of the glass part of the display - this would mean you’d have 128+64=192 wires to align and maintain contact. Reliability would be terrible with 192 wires instead of (probably) 8. If this display were color, it would be many more wires - 128x(64x3) = 320 wires - even more of a nightmare vs. just 8. And those wires would be around the periphery of the logic board - the wiring would be insane.
Now, you could add a dedicated logic board … probably a flex circuit to make it thinner … that would do all this. But it would be thicker, probably less robust, and it would be new technology that is riskier. It’s a tradeoff moto didn’t make.
Unlike Samsung, Motorola refused to give us projected battery life, but
they implied that it would be “very good,” whatever that may mean.
So my guess: 24 hours if you’re lucky, but probably less. (But, like Samsung, advertised with something vague like “all day” by assuming certain usage patterns.)
Exactly, it’s a tradeoff, not “unavoidable.” And I hate it.
To be clear, I don’t actually care THAT much about it, just my own sensibilities go against making a round screen and then having part chopped off. I would rather forget about making it round.
My watch is pretty smart: Radio Atomic-clock receiving, 200M Water Resistant, Tide Graph, Phases of the Moon, Digital Compass plus Bearing Memory, Altimeter w/memory, Barometer w/graph, Thermometer, EL Backlight, World Time (29 time zones (33 cities)), DST, 5 Daily Alarms, Countdown Timer and Alarm, Progress Beeper, 1/100 second stopwatch w/Elapsed time, split time, 1st-2nd place times, Hourly Time Signal, Auto Calendar (pre-programmed until the year 2099), 12/24 Hour Formats, Accurate to 20 seconds per month (with no signal calibration), Solar powered - approx. battery life in total darkness: 5 months on full charge with Power Saving Function. And it’s built out of titanium.
Zero app updates, zero chance of being pwned, zero security holes, 100% chance of outliving me.
That tide graph is pretty spiffy.
The traces in question are on the inner surface of the glass - the butter on the bread, so to speak. Are you proposing that they somehow deposit traces around the edge of the glass to the other side?
That would be a bit of a manufacturing headache.
If the traces are already on the underside then it’s even easier: just bond the drivers onto the underside, in contact with trace pads.
The traces are not on the underside. The way that an LCD works is that there are metal traces sputtered onto the glass, on the sides of the glass sheets that face each other. The liquid crystal material is between these metalized surfaces. The glass surface is very smooth, as glass is. This allows fine lines to be placed there quickly on a production basis, using photographic processes applied to the flat surface.
Getting these traces to wrap around the glass to the back of the display is not trivial. The photo-printing of the trace mask pattern would have to be done to a curved surface. This would be akin to producing a photographic print around the edges of a paper disc. I imagine that it’s possible (as are most things other than faster-than-light travel), but it’s not anything that an LCD factory is currently capable of doing, as far as I know.
Time to bring out a line of Moto 360 stickers to cover the gap
